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Monday, May 8, 2017

Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton

Looking for information about Grand Canyon National Park?
The Smithsonian Museums? Perhaps the Great Wall of China, or maybe the Eiffel
Tower? Then Atlas Obscura is not the travel guide for you. Looking for
information on where to go to partake in local delicacies such as eggs boiled
in the urine of young boys? Interested in the distinction between the largest
ball of twine collected by one person and the largest ball collected by more
than one person?

Then you’ve come to exactly the right book.

Written by three writers/editors of the Atlas Obscura website
(Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton), Atlas Obscura the book is a
massive compendium of weird, remote, and always interesting geographical spots
and historical remembrances. If you enjoy the website, you will certainly enjoy
this “Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders.” This is not a book for
tourists, and this is not a book for the meek. This is a book for the
emboldened, for those who want to see the world’s hidden places.

Structured as a geographical tour through the continents, Atlas
Obscura is filled with examples of natural wonders: caves, lakes, deserts, and
the like. But more interesting to me, likely because they are also more unknown
to me, are the human-made wonders. Throughout the book's survey of the various
continents are examples of what one person can accomplish through sheer will.
Castles, pyramids, shrines—all built by individuals on their own over a
lifetime. And of course there are also the oddities: the ice cream parlor in Venezuela
that serves over 900 flavors, including Ham + Cheese and Sardines and Brandy;
devices used to give tobacco smoke enemas in the 18th and 19th centuries; books
bound in the skin of their authors; the "body farm" in Tennessee,
where scientists study decomposition; an anechoic chamber in Minneapolis, where
the absence of sound freaks out visitors; the one-mile square desert near the
Arctic Circle ringed by snow-topped mountains.

Saturday was Obscura Day 2017 on atlasobscura.com, and this book will make you
want to take part in the next one. We often forget the vast weirdness of the
world, as well as the isolation that still exists in some places. And though the
increasing "stripmallification" of travel pushes people to the same spots, pushes
people toward comfort rather than curiosity, Atlas Obscura makes childhood
wonder return to jaded adult minds.